When Violence Is Justified to Defend Civil Society
Tony Woodlief, The American Conservative, September 1, 2020
Teenager Kyle Rittenhouse’s shooting of three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, has sharpened the debate between left and right over whether rioting can be justly met with violence. Opinions about Rittenhouse’s attempt to interpose himself and his AR-15 between rioters and buildings in Kenosha have become entangled with beliefs about the relative value of property versus people, a juxtaposition dishonestly advanced by the left.
Writing in The Nation, R.H. Lossin captured the Left’s point of view artfully, proclaiming: “Plateglass [sic] windows don’t bleed. They don’t die and leave loved ones grieving. They don’t contribute to the collective trauma and terror experienced by their communities. They just break, and then, at some point, they are replaced by identical sheets of glass.”
Leaving aside her comical lack of curiosity about where, exactly, sheets of glass come from, Lossin expresses a widespread sentiment, and it has a certain indisputable logic: things are not, after all, people.
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{snip} What’s at stake in these riots is not property, but the civic order. The most honest, ardent leftists admit as much. Looting is imperative, writes R.H. Lossin, “not because property destruction has any moral or political value in itself, but because it is coercive. It is an actual threat to order and a very real threat to capital.” Describing looting advocate Vicky Osterweil’s point of view, her fawning NPR interviewer exclaims that rioters “are engaging in a powerful tactic that questions the justice of ‘law and order,’ and the distribution of property and wealth in an unequal society.”
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{snip} The question is not whether this should be met with force because of the inherent damage it inflicts on property. The question is whether civil society is worth preserving with violence.
This question answers itself. When civil society disappears, individualized violence is the only means of resolving disputes. In the state of nature, red in tooth and claw, might makes right. Withdraw the police long enough, and you get Kyle Rittenhouse. The shame of it is that so many able-bodied men in Kenosha relied on a boy from Illinois to defend their streets. The danger is that masses of them will begin to feel similarly responsible for confronting hoodlums—as witnessed recently in the streets of Portland.
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Violence is justified against marauders not because of the relative value of property versus life, but because of the essential purpose and fragile composition of civil society. {snip}
{snip} Absent courage on the part of elected officials to deploy police—and give them appropriate leeway to use violence against the violent—we will return to armed citizen militias. The Second Amendment will once again be justified for a purpose many thought antiquated.
And people will die. Many more will die, most likely, than would be the case if our civil officials performed their chief duty. The question is whether enough of them have the moral fortitude to do so. Or will they stay cowering in their offices, persecuting a Kyle Rittenhouse when they can, bleating that defenders are attackers, marauders are demonstrators, and war is peace?
